Cassandra: Quick fixes in Apple Photos (1)

By Graham K. Rogers

I am using a new MacBook at the office running OS X 10.10.4. I have only had this in my hands a few days and have certainly missed changing a couple of the settings, to make it match (as closely as possible) the other Macs I use. One came to light when editing in Photos. I knew I had taken a picture in April and that it was in my Favorites album as I want access to this particular picture occasionally.

I opened the album, tapped on the thumbnail image and then pressed Edit. Instead of downloading, the image showed a warning (!) in the bottom right. I went back to the image in the timeline, but the same happened. I brought up the Information (i) panel and saw that the day and month were correct, but the year was shown as 2558 (Buddhist Calendar - default here in Thailand).

In System Preferences > Language & Region I changed the Calendar setting to Gregorian and when I went back to Photos, the application was able to load the image and I could edit the image. The date of the original and the date as shown on the computer were in conflict, making the image unavailable initially.

Note also that while an image is being downloaded in preparation for editing, the tools icons to the right of the panel are greyed out. Once the image is available, those icons are live.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.